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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Parma, Surry Hills - pizza and pasta making class

In the culinary world, there a lot of
things that delights me. One of them is discovering how I can easily replicate
a restaurant quality dish in the comfort of my own kitchen. At a recent
pizza/pasta making class in Parma, they made what seemed so hard, evidently
easy. As pizza and pasta our two of my favourites, I was in my zone!

Parma is located right on the corner of Campbell and Crown Streets, Surry
Hills. This new 120 seat Italian restaurant features hip and stylish décor. I
particularly like the walls on the second floor that boasts awesome
contemporary artwork. The friendly staff, cooks and chef adds up to the
coolness factor of this joint.

Oh yeah, that's me workin' it!

To start things up, the vibrant Chef
Alessandro (who loves the Naruto anime like me and is originally from Lombardy,
Italy) took us through what the course will consist of. Recipes, aprons and
hand towels were handed to each of us thereafter. He went through the
recipes for making excellent quality pasta and pizza dough step by step. He
went as far as getting into the core of each process and he also gave us tips.

For example, he said to never add salt
when making pizza dough starter (yeast and warm water mixture). The salt
actually kills the yeast therefore, the pizza dough won't become elastic at the
end. It is added after mixing both wet and dry ingredients. The kneading
process starts by pushing and breaking the dough with the heel of your palm and
quickly pulling the dough back. This is done continuously around five to ten
minutes to build up gluten and to make the dough elastic.

We also made different kinds of pasta.
We were asked to feel the pasta and observe how thin it should be. How thick or
thin a sheet of pasta dough should depend on what type of pasta you want to
make. My favourite part of the class was making ravioli from scratch! Chef
Alessandro also demonstrated how to make a ricotta based filling for the
ravioli. It all looked so easy.

While the pizza was being cooked in the
over, he showed us a few pasta sauces we could make to prepare the pastas with.

After all of that, the fruits of our
labour were served for us to feast on! My taste buds particularly loved the
ricotta ravioli with burnt sage butter and Margherita pizza.

ricotta ravioli with burnt sage butter

The pasta on the ravioli was cooked al
dente and the filling was flavourful. The caramelised flavour from the burnt
sage butter was sensational. He took the burnt sage butter to another level by
adding capers and anchovies.

Margherita pizza

The Margherita pizza was very simple yet
full of flavour from the cheese, tomato, oregano and basil. The herbs brought
the best out of the fresh buffalina mozzarella.

Polenta cake

Chef Alessandro takes traditional
pizza/pasta cooking and gives it his own contemporary twist without making the
dishes too complicated. He explained everything as simple as possible. He equipped
us with enough knowledge so that we could also possibly become our own Parma
cooks at home. At Parma, it’s not about putting a lot of ingredients just to
create a good dish. It is to put together minimal fresh ingredients that blend
well for an excellent dish with maximum taste. Everything in Parma is made from
scratch!

Ramen Raff was invited by Helen Lear to participate in the pizza/pasta making class at Parma as a guest.

What a fun looking class! Haha the chef was a Naruto fan..Man how good is burnt sage butter sauce AMAAZZINGG. I love learning how to make restaurant dishes at home as well - always get a kick out of it! Pretty cool that Parma makes all their dishes from scratch, props to them!

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